Although it is slightly different from an object of the present application, as an apparatus that changes transport speed of bills according to a manual operation or an automatic operation, for example, there is an apparatus described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. H5-159130.
The technique disclosed in the above publication attempts to suppress the occurrence of faults such as jamming as much as possible at the time of the automatic operation in a bill processing apparatus, by increasing the transport speed at the time of a manual operation and decreasing the transport speed at the time of an automatic operation considering a relation between the transport speed and the fault incidence such as jamming.
While bill recognizing and counting apparatus are used at branches of a bank, processing manners are different between during and after the banking hours. Specifically, during the banking hours, bills of various denominations are processed in a mixed state, whereas after the banking hours, a main process is an operation for confirming the number of bills, which have been sorted out for each denomination.
That is, denomination recognition is essential in the processing during the banking hours, whereas a high-speed counting function is desired for the processing after the banking hours.
Conventional bill recognizing and counting apparatus have a denomination mode for performing the denomination recognition and a counting mode in which the denomination recognition is not performed. However, even in the counting mode in which the denomination recognition is not performed, the number of bills processed per unit time is the same as that of the denomination mode, and a bill recognizing and counting apparatus having a high-speed counting function incorporated therein has not been realized yet.